HOSTILE COASTS
An hour from that time, the air-liner was drifting sideways at low
altitudes, hardly five hundred feet above the waves. A sad spectacle
she made, her wreckage gilded by the infinite splendors of the sun now
lowering toward the horizon. Her helicopters were droning with all the
force that could be flung into them from the crippled power-plant. Her
propellers--some charred to mere stumps on their shafts--stood starkly
motionless.
Oddly awry she hung, driven slowly eastward by the wind. Her rudder
was burned clean off; her stern, warped, reeking with white fumes that
drifted on the late afternoon air told of the fury that had blazed
about her. Flames no longer roared away; but the teeth of their
consuming rage had bitten deep. Where the aft observation pit had
been, now only a twisted net of metal-work remained, with all the
plate-glass melted and cracked away. The body of Gorlitz, trapped
there, had mercifully fallen into the sea. That ghastly thing, at any
rate, no longer remained.
Four Legionaries were in the pilot-house: the Master, Bohannan,
Leclair, and "Captain Alden." For the most part, they held silence.
There was little for them to say. At length the major spoke.
"Still sagging down, eh?" he commented, his eyes on the needle of the
altimeter. "Some situation! Two men dead and others injured. Engines
crippled, propellers the same, and two floats so damaged we couldn't
stay on the surface if we came down. Well, by God!"
Leclair looked very grim.
"I regret only," said he in broken English, "that the stowaway escaped
us. Ah, _la belle exécution_, if we had him now!"
The Master, at the starboard window, kept silence. No one sat at the
wheel. Of what use could it have been? The Master was looking far
to eastward, now with the naked eye, now sweeping the prospect with
binoculars. He was studying the African coast, clearly in sight as a
long, whitish line of sand with a whiter collar of foamy surf, fifteen
miles away.
A few gulls had begun to show--strange, small gulls, yellow-beaked
and swift. Off to northward, a native dhow was beating down-wind with
full-bellied lateen sail, with matting over its hatches. Heat was
beginning to grow intense, for no longer was _Nissr_ making a gale
that cooled; no longer was she at high, cold levels. Africa, the
tropics, had suddenly become real; and the sudden contrast oppressed
them all.
Through the shimmering, quivering air, an arid pallor extended up the
eastern sky; a pale, milky illumination, dull-white over the desert,
that told of the furnace into which _Nissr_ was drifting--if indeed
she could survive till she reached land. The glasses showed tawny
reaches of sand, back a little from the coast; and beyond these, low
hills, or rather rolling dunes, lay empurpled by vibrant heat-hazes.
"It won't be much like navigating over that Hell-spot, three or four
miles in the air," muttered Bohannan. He looked infinitely depressed.
The way he gnawed at his red mustache showed how misadventure had
raveled his nerve.
No one answered him. Leclair lighted a cigarette, and silently
squinted at Africa with eyes long inured to the sun of that land of
flame. Alden, at the other window, kept silence, too. That masked
face could express no emotion; but something in the sag of the woman's
shoulders, the droop of her head, showed how profound and intense was
her suffering.
"Faith, are we going to make it, chief?" asked the major, impatiently.
Not his the temperament that can wait in silence. He made a singular
figure as he lounged there at the pilot-house window, huge elbows
on the sill. One hand was wrapped in bandages, well saturated with
croton-oil. Chars and burns on his uniform showed where blazing petrol
from the final explosion had spattered him.
His eyes, like the Master's, were bloodshot, inflamed. Part of his red
crop of hair had been singed off, and all his eyelashes were gone,
as well as half his bushy red brows. But the ugly set of his jaw, the
savage gleam of his eyes showed that no physical pain was depressing
him. His only trouble was the thought that perhaps the expedition of
the Flying Legion had ended before it had really begun.
"What chance, sir?" he insisted. "It's damned bad, according to my way
of thinking."
"What you think and what you say won't have any weight with this
problem of aerial flotation," the Master curtly retorted. "If we make
land, we make it, that's all, sir." He relapsed into silence. Leclair
muttered, in Arabic--his words audible only to himself--an ancient
Islamic proverb: "Allah knows best, and time will show!" Then, after a
moment's pause, the single word: "Kismet!"
Silence again, in which the Master's brain reviewed the stirring
incidents of the past hour and a half--how the stowaway had evaded
Dr. Lombardo's vigilance and (thoroughly familiar with every detail
of _Nissr_) had succeeded in making his way to the aft port fuel-tank,
from which he had probably drained petrol through a pet-cock and
thereafter set it afire; how the miscreant had then scrambled up the
aft companion-ladder, to shoot down the Master himself; and how only
a horrible, nightmare fight against the flames had saved even this
shattered wreck of the air-liner.
It had all been Kloof's fault, of course, and Lombardo's. Those
two had permitted this disaster to befall, and--yes, they should be
punished, later. But how? The Master's mind attacked this problem.
Each of the four Legionaries in the pilot-house was busy with his own
thoughts.
On and on toward the approaching shores of Africa drifted the wounded
Eagle of the Sky, making no headway save such as the west wind
gave her. Steadily the needle of the altimeter kept falling. The
high-pitched drone of the helicopters told that the crippled engines
were doing their best; but even that best was not quite enough.
Like a tired creature of the air, the liner lagged, she sank. Before
half the distance had been covered to that gleaming beach, hardly six
hundred feet lay between the lower gallery of _Nissr_ and the long,
white-toothed waves that, slavering, hungered for her gigantic body
and the despairing crew she bore.
Suddenly the Master spoke into the engine-room telephone.
"Can you do any better?" exclaimed the chief. "This is not enough!"
"We're doing our best, sir," came the voice of Frazier, now in charge.
"If you can possibly strain a point, in some way, and wring a little
more power out of the remaining engines--"
"We're straining them beyond the limit now, sir."
The Master fell silent, pondering. His eyes sought the dropping
needle. Then the light of decision filled his eyes. A smile came to
his face, where the deep gash made by the splinter of glass had been
patched up with collodion and cotton. He plugged in on another line,
by the touch of a button.
"Simonds! Is that you?"
"Yes, sir," answered the quartermaster, in charge of all the stores.
"Have you jettisoned everything?"
"All we can spare, sir. All but the absolute minimum of food and
water."
"Overboard with them all!"
"But, sir--"
"And drop the body of Auchincloss, too. This is no time for
sentiment!"
"But--"
"My order, sir!"
Five minutes later, cases, boxes, bales, water-tanks, began spinning
from open ports and down through the trap-door in the lower gallery.
Then followed the seared corpse of Auchincloss, a good man who had
died in harness, fighting to the end. Those to whom the duty was
assigned of giving his metal-weighted body sea burial turned away
their eyes, so that they might not see that final plunge. But
the sound of the body striking the waves rocketed up to them with
sickening distinctness.
Lightened a little, _Nissr_ seemed to rally for a few minutes. The
altimeter needle ceased its drop, trembled and even rose _.275_
degrees.
"God! If we only had an ounce more power!" burst out the major, his
mouth mumbling the loose ends of that flamboyant mustache. The Master
remained quite impassive, and made no answer. Bohannan reddened,
feeling that the chief's silence had been another rebuff. And on,
on drifted _Nissr_, askew, up-canted, with the pitiless sunlight
of approaching evening in every detail revealing--as it slanted in,
almost level, over the far-heaving infinitudes of the Atlantic--the
ravages wrought by flame.
Bohannan could not long be silent. The exuberance of his nature burst
forth with a half-defiant:
"If _I_ were in charge, which I'm not, I'd stop those damned
helicopters, let her down, turn what power we've got into the
remaining propellers, and taxi ashore!"
"And probably sink, or break up in the surf, on the beach, there!"
curtly rejoined the Master. "Ah! _What_?"
His binoculars checked their sweep along the coast, which in its
absolute barrenness looked a place of death for whatever might have
life there.
"You see something, _mon capitaine?_" asked Leclair, blowing smoke
from his cigarette. "Allow me also to look! Where is it?"
"Just to north of that gash--that wady, or gully, making down to the
beach. You see it, eh?"
Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringes
of that desolation. Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise
of shade. No house, no hut was visible. Not even a patch of grass
could be discerned. The African coast lay stretched out in ivory
nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat,
by the beatings of surf eternal.
Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces of
sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled
with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call _sabkhàh_,
or sheets of gypsum. The setting sun painted all this horror of
desolation with strange rose and orange hues, with umbers and pale
purples that for a moment reminded the Master of the sunset he had
witnessed from the windows of _Niss'rosh_, the night his great plan
had come to him. Only eight days ago, that night had been; it seemed
eight years!
Carefully Leclair observed this savage landscape, over which a
brilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vague
edge of the world. Serious though the situation was, the Frenchman
could not repress a thought of the untamed beauty of that scene--a
land long familiar to him, in the days when he had flown down these
coasts on punitive expeditions against the rebellious Beni Harb clans
of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents. Africa, once more seen
under such unexpected circumstances, roused his blood as he peered at
the crude intensity of it, the splendid blaze of its seared nakedness
under the blood-red sun-ball now dropping to rest.
All at once his glass stopped its sweep.
"Smoke, my Captain!" he exclaimed. "See, it curls aloft like a lady's
ringlet. And--beyond the wady--"
"Ah, you see them, too?"
The major's glass, held unsteadily in his unbandaged hand, was now
fixed on the indicated spot, as was "Captain Alden's."
"I see them," the Master answered. "And the green flag--the flag of
the Prophet--"
"The flag, _oui, mon capitaine!_ There are many men, but--"
"But what, Lieutenant?"
"Ah, do you not see? No horses. No camels. That means their oasis is
not far. That means they are not traveling. This is no nomadic moving
of the Ahl Bayt. No, no, my Captain. It is--"
"Well, what?"
"A war-party. What you in your language call the--the reception
committee, _n'est-ce pas?_ Ah, yes, the reception committee."
"And the guests?" demanded the major.
"The guests are all the members of the Flying Legion!" answered the
Frenchman, with another draw at his indispensable cigarette.